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Lady Gaga to Glamour: I’m “Not Conventionally Beautiful” (VIDEO)

Lady Gaga covers the Glamour Women of the Year issue, opening up to the magazine about beauty, her perceived rivalry with Madonna, and why she wears those crazy costumes.

Interviewer Andy Cohen asks Gaga about her confidence.

“I’m confident in who I am,” she says. “I’ve come to a place in my life where I’ve accepted things that are me, as opposed to feeling pressure to explain myself to people around me. That’s just the way I’ve always tried to be. It didn’t change when I became a star.”

She answers, “Not conventionally beautiful. If there was some sort of mathematical equation for beauty, I don’t know if I would be the algorithm. I’ve always been OK with that. I’m not a supermodel. That’s not what I do.”

“What I do is music,” explains Gaga. “I want my fans to feel the way I do, to know what they have to offer is just as important, more important, than what’s happening on the outside.”

In fact, she wonders if beauty can “get in the way.”

“In some ways, the outfits — these creations are because I don’t want to face the reality of what people want from a female pop star,” reveals Gaga. “Everybody always laughs because I feel so much more comfortable with, like, a giant paper bag on my whole body and paint on my face.”

She continues, “Sometimes I try really hard to take it all off. But inevitably what’s underneath is still not a straight edge. And I don’t think it ever will be.”

As for leaving behind her actual name, the star says that she’s bothered when people who don’t know her well call her Stefani.

“I became somebody else for a reason, you know. This is part of what my message is — you can become whoever you want to be, to escape your past,” explains the singer.

She says that her Born This Way Foundation is “everything that I’ve ever believed in.”

“My ambition was never to rule the world. It was always to change the world,” says Gaga. “And once I started to become more and more successful, this voice in the back of my mind was telling me to make sure that I staked my claim as a person. The Born This Way Foundation isn’t about money at all. It’s about communities, people coming together.”

It’s one of the reasons why she hates that people compared “Born This Way” to Madonna’s “Express Yourself.”

“I never care personally what people say about me. But is it inspiring a community to split down the center and go to war over who is the queen?” asks Gaga. “The music, and the message — this will always be more important to me than people thinking I’m the best.”

She continues, “And any sort of bantering about ‘am I going to have a career like hers’ — who’s to say I’m anything like her at all? Who’s to say that my ambitions are even the same as hers? Who’s to say I’m not an entirely different person?”

Gaga knows what she wants.

“An artist is the only thing I want to be. I only want my freedom and my creativity,” she tells the magazine. “It’s all that I live for. I reject the idea that I have to take all [the costumes and makeup] off to be f–king authentic.”